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Product: IBM ThinkPad X40
Price: $13,988
Pros: Wonderfully light and sturdy machine with features that should make recovery from all kinds of disasters easier
Cons: No Firewire, no DVD-RW option

There are two ways to get everything you want on a notebook computer: build it all in and make it thick and heavy or leave half of what you may want off and add it on through a docking station.
 Apple Computer once played with the docking station idea but soon abandoned it.
 IBM obviously feels it is a good idea. 
The ThinkPad X40 is extremely light when not attached to the docking station and not too heavy when they are connected.
 It weighs 1.2kg, is only 2.1cm to 2.7cm thick and is just big enough to take a 12-inch screen.
 It does get thicker when attached to the docking station but it is still light. 
Among its features are a 1.2-gigahertz Pentium M processor and 802.11b/g and Bluetooth wireless networking.
 The CD-RW/DVD-Rom drive is standard and, oddly enough, cannot be upgraded to include DVD burning. 
The docking station (the X4 UltraBase Dock) adds serial, parallel, PS/2 and Ethernet ports, three USB ports, a modem and a monitor for $1,749.
IBM claims to have a really tough Active Protection System for the hard drive.
 You can apparently drop the notebook on almost anything and the disk will not break.
 Although extremely tempted, I did not test this. 
Another way to protect your machine that I could not test was the IBM Rescue and Recovery. 
This should make a difference if the machine fails, and IBM claims you can save as much as US$400 in support costs. 
it would be nice one of these days to see IBM offer Linux as an alternative operating system to be bundled with the machine.
 The company has been making so much noise about Linux, it should be able to do this.
 Nevertheless, it's a lovely little machine that gets the job done.



Big Blue puts faith in docking system